Review: The Anti-Clinton Brigade’s Four-Letter Word Obsession

I’ve been bingeing on a lot of anti-Hillary Clinton books lately. Some of their gripes are legitimate and verifiable; some are halfway down the six-lane expressway to bonkersville. But of all the unlikely themes to emerge from them, of all the conspiracies they propose and the outrages they cite, the strangest of all is quite straightforward: that Mrs. Clinton is a potty mouth.

It’s hard to convey how pervasive this notion is. Some of these books are as obsessed with her supposed coarseness as they are with Travelgate, Benghazi, Vince Foster and missing emails. In Edward Klein’s “Guilty as Sin,” which came out last week, roughly two-thirds of the anonymously sourced quotations attributed to Mrs. Clinton are salted with obscenities. It’s enough to make you wonder if the woman has David Milch on monthly retainer, generating her dialogue.

In light of the recently leaked audiotape of Donald J. Trump talking to Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood,” this fixation with Mrs. Clinton’s language makes for a uniquely peculiar reading experience. Mr. Trump’s comments weren’t just foul in style, but in content: He declared that his celebrity allowed him to grab attractive women by the genitals (I am paraphrasing here, but for the four Martians who haven’t heard it, let’s just say he wasn’t delicate about his choice of terms); he used the F-word as a verb, and not in the sense of gaslighting someone or telling a menace to buzz off.

Yet Mr. Trump’s supporters, as we’ve seen, do not care if he is a vulgarian. That, arguably, is precisely what they admire about him — that he says what he thinks, that political correctness gives him a rash. His words were simply “locker room talk,” the muscular flourishes of an alpha male. But the prospect of a blaspheming Hillary Clinton is clearly repulsive to those who despise her. What is it about female profanity — or her possible profanity specifically — that’s such a potent signifier? What is it a conservative shorthand for? Because the text here is not subtle.

In “Crisis of Character,” for instance, Gary J. Byrne, a former uniformed Secret Service officer, writing with Grant M. Schmidt, mentions Mrs. Clinton’s “obscenity-laced tirades” on the first page of his introduction, and the opening sentence from the first lady includes a hearty expletive. In “The Clintons’ War on Women,” Roger Stone and Robert Morrow dedicate an entire chapter to presumed profanities from the Clintons, almost all of them coming from Hillary, almost all of them involving F-bombs. (No one around her is safe from her “garbage mouth,” apparently; it strafes a village.)

And then there’s Mr. Klein, who has made a cottage industry off tabloid books about the Clintons and the Kennedys. He has Mrs. Clinton cursing at Barack Obama in the prologue — the prologue! — of “Unlikeable: The Problem With Hillary” and assures us that sources close to both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama’s adviser Valerie Jarrett “independently confirmed the wording of Hillary’s outburst.” In “Guilty as Sin,” he just says it outright on Page 5: “Hillary has always had the reputation of swearing like a drunken sailor.”

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Hillary Clinton, above, at a rally in Harrisburg, Pa.CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times

Now, to be clear: It’s not at all clear that Mrs. Clinton is a cuss. The authors’ sources are generally unnamed or not what one might exactly deem reliable. (The Association of Former Agents of the United States Secret Service made the unusual move of denouncing “Crisis of Character” when it came out, implying Mr. Byrne couldn’t have witnessed all the events he claimed he did.)

There are some reputable reports of Mrs. Clinton’s using off-color language to express her irritation — in Russell L. Riley’s “Inside the Clinton White House: An Oral History,” for instance, or in Mark Leibovich’s “This Town” — but these blue outbursts wouldn’t necessarily distinguish her from her male peers. According to Jesse Sheidlower, the lexicographer and author of “The F-Word,” most studies show that men and women curse more or less the same amount. Women are plenty in touch with their inner Cartman.

Anyway, that’s not the point. Surely no one would blink if told that a male politician spoke this way. Lyndon B. Johnson most certainly did.

So what gives?

One possibility: Objections to Mrs. Clinton’s swearing have nothing to do with profanity per se, but with hypocrisy. Swearing is the clearest evidence we have of how different her public and private selves really are. Sure, the former secretary of state may appear cool and disciplined on the outside, smiling and pleasantly nodding as her political opponent threatens to throw her in jail. But beneath that porcelain surface, she’s a scheming empress of fury.

Years ago, I wrote that Mrs. Clinton was a bit like a building with no door. It’s still true. Though she has spent three decades in the spotlight, Mrs. Clinton remains hard to read. (Whereas with Mr. Trump, there are no hidden depths: Dig a little deeper, and you just get more Mr. Trump.) Her wariness has famously created a vicious feedback loop that makes her shut down, rather than open up, whenever she’s taken to task for any of her behaviors, which lord knows are far from perfect. But if you’re prone to support Mrs. Clinton, you assume that what lies beneath her imperturbable exterior is an essential decency. If you’re prone to loathe her, you assign her the personality of a shrew — and claim that she shouted “And how did Bill’s impeachment work out for those [expletive]?” on Page 4 of your book.

A rational question, actually, at least from a political perspective.

Most politicians have front-stage and backstage personalities, to borrow the language of the midcentury sociologist Erving Goffman. But the more consistent they are — either by being permanent backstage types (like John McCain, who tends toward informality, no matter what the setting) or front-stage types (like Ronald Reagan, who always seemed to be performing, no matter what the setting) — the more comfortable the public seems to be with them. The problem with Mrs. Clinton is that voters detect a huge gulf between her front-stage and backstage selves.

You wonder whether this will be a problem for female politicians for years to come. They’re obliged to hew to a much stricter set of regulations when they speak in public.

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Some of the books written by the detractors of Hillary Clinton. CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times

This notion that Mrs. Clinton is secretly wrathful appears in another familiar motif in these books: She’s a thrower, the progenitor of her own asteroid belt. Among the objects she’s supposedly hurled: A lamp. (The only instance of this behavior to be reported, as rumor, in the mainstream media; never confirmed.) A heavy water glass. A vase. A cellphone. A Bible.

Here, I would point out: If Mrs. Clinton is throwing Bibles — this story comes up more than once — isn’t that sort a good thing? Doesn’t that mean she always keeps them around, even if they occasionally double as weaponry?

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist who has done some of the most interesting work on our divided electorate, told me in a conversation that he wonders if cursing poses the same problem for conservatives that Bill Clinton’s willingness to answer “Boxers or briefs?” did. Liberals didn’t get why Mr. Clinton’s choice to entertain the question was a big deal. But conservatives — who in Mr. Haidt’s research assign a high value to ideas like “respect for authority” and “sanctity” (whereas liberals lend greater weight to concepts like “fairness”) — recoiled at such casual degradation of the Oval Office.

It’s also possible that the preoccupation with Mrs. Clinton’s ostensible penchant for cursing isn’t about hypocrisy at all, but old-fashioned anxiety about the dissolution of traditional gender roles. There’s plenty in these books (and beyond them, for that matter) to suggest that we’re still keeping two separate sets of ledgers for our female and our male candidates. They exist in a universe where Sheryl Sandberg never wrote “Lean In,” for starters.

“She is ruthless, she is grasping,” writes Dinesh D’Souza in “Hillary’s America.” “She is old, and mean, and even her laugh is a witch’s cackle.” To be fair, vulgarity is not a theme in his book. Then again, many fantastical ideas are — and he did call the first female presidential nominee from a major party a witch.

It’s that old, reliable standby: There’s something unfeminine about a woman’s quest for power. Mr. Klein never wastes an opportunity to portray Mrs. Clinton as sexless. She is “dressed in a blue muumuu” in one scene and showing up to meetings “bedraggled and dressed in sweats” in the next. In “Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary,” Dick Morris and Eileen McGann call her “macho” at least twice, and — while they, too, refrain from discussing her language — assure us that if Hillary were elected, she would feel the power of the presidency “in every bone of her body and exercise it effortlessly and ruthlessly.” (Ruthless. That word again.)

Yet here’s the punch line: As with Mr. Trump, the very traits that make Mrs. Clinton so unappealing to her detractors may make her immensely appealing to her fans. At one point in “Unlikeable,” Mr. Klein has her putting her feet up on her desk, swigging a Michelob Ultra and doing impersonations of world leaders. Her haters will conclude from this image that she’s sexless (beer-swilling) and disrespectful of her station. But her admirers will read it as pure Amy Schumer. And if Mrs. Clinton does indeed top her frustrations with a Tourettic garland of unprintables — well, then she’s Selina Meyer on “Veep.” And when Selina curses, it shows spine.

Once again, our two cultures are talking past each other. And they probably will, right until the bitter end, when someone places his or her hand on the Bible and says a very different kind of oath.